Who said shrinking government would be easy?

Although it’s a refrain in New York that the public sector is too big, efforts at consolidation tend to fail. Will today’s big report on government efficiency change anything?

Hilary Smith

With gas nearing $4 a gallon and grocery prices climbing, many taxpayers plan to use their forthcoming rebate checks just to cover their everyday expenses. Most households have had to make at least small changes in their budgets and lifestyles in face of the rising cost of living. Some changes involve consolidation, such as combining errands to save on gas. Other changes, such as buying groceries in bulk, take advantage of economies of scale.

Taxes are rising, too, and many say that governments should take the same approach: When possible, share services or consolidate entire governments.

A state commission will roll out a report on the topic today with 70 recommendations for changes that would “enable, encourage and incentivize” municipal consolidation, said John Clarkson, executive director of the Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness.

If that all sounds familiar, it is.

State governors have called for repeated commissions to study consolidation. Commissions were called under Gov. Mario Cuomo from 1990 to 1993 and under Gov. George Pataki from 2002 to 2004. A private commission was formed by the non-governmental Rockefeller Institute from 1990-1992, and the state Education Department from 1992 to 1995 examined possibilities for consolidation in New York school districts.

Each commission was in favor of more consolidation and made recommendations encouraging it. But the suggestions were met with negative local reactions, and few were ultimately acted-upon.

Last April, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer named the Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness — a 15-member group that includes state legislators, local government officials and representatives from the private sector. It has already released a series of preliminary recommendations that was included in the 2008 executive budget. One such recommendation — an increase in the consolidation incentives for towns and villages — has already been enacted.

Clarkson said that this commission’s report is different from past reports because the group studied more than 200 actual consolidation projects while it was forming its policy recommendations.

Two of those projects — a fiber-optic network that would provide regionwide high-speed Internet access and countywide consolidation of property-value-assessment offices — were submitted by Ontario County.

‘We can’t afford it’

Clarkson didn’t want to give too much away before the big press conference today, but state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was more animated when he spoke to a group of journalists earlier this month at a luncheon sponsored by the New York Press Association. He told the group that if fire, lighting and sewer districts are considered, there are more than 10,000 local governments across the state. (Former Governor Eliot Spitzer’s office last year put that number at 4,200, without special districts.)
“Sure, we have lots of jobs and lots of patronage, but it’s not effective, and we can’t afford it,” Cuomo told the group of more than 500 attendees.

Cuomo said the state can mandate consolidation or offer economic incentives — tax breaks — to jump-start consolidation. “Or we need a grassroots movement of the people to go to their leadership and demand it,” he said. “If people understood this, they would demand change.”

The Center for Governmental Research, a Rochester-based think tank, has time and time again found possibilities for savings when municipalities merge.

In a 2006 study, CGR reported that local government services cost 44 percent less in northern Virginia than on Long Island, “although the level of services and citizen satisfaction with those services appear comparable.” The study showed that Virginia administered most services on a countywide or regional basis, whereas Long Island had 127 individual school districts and 179 fire departments.

Another study found that consolidating police departments in the Erie County town of Evans and village of Angola would save those municipalities about $140,000 per year.
Other CGR studies showed cost saving opportunities via the sharing of services in the Monroe County School Districts, a shared town/village hall for the town of Wheatland and the village of Scottsville and the adoption of regionwide 911 and wastewater services in Monroe County.

Skeptics

Despite the numerous studies touting the benefits of consolidation, some argue that the economic argument for consolidating governments might not be so clearcut.

“I think it’s a good idea in theory, but the evidence has been somewhat mixed,” said Mike Fedele, president of the Penfield Economic Club.

Fedele argues that economies of scale make sense when a company is producing, or a consumer is buying, a large quantity of a standard good or service. But the needs of a community and the services government offers are anything but standard, he argues.
“There’s so much variability between communities that when two merge, many of the economies of scale they thought they were going to achieve go out the door,” said Fedele.

Then there’s the argument that keeping a village separate from a town preserves that village’s identity, which many fear would be lost in a merger with a town.

“We’re talking about a few thousand dollars’ savings, but I’m concerned about identity,” said Clifton Springs Village Mayor William Hunter.

Victor Village Mayor John Holden agrees.

“Is the reason (for dissolution) in the long run to save money? In the end, I think it’s worth paying the money to retain what we have,” he said, referring to village services.

Former Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson, a member of the governor’s commission, is among the area’s most vocal supporters of consolidation. But he acknowledges the difficulty municipalities face when they consider consolidating.

“It’s a subject people like to talk about, but nothing happens,” said Johnson. “For whatever reason, there is an almost built-in resistance to two units consolidating into one.”

Johnson says that even partial steps toward consolidation — such as sharing services with a neighboring town — are steps in the right direction.

“I’ve come to appreciate the need to slow down a little bit, but not to stand still,” he said.

Failed attempts

In March, Macedon residents voted by a margin of just 29 votes against dissolving the village. Under the proposal, the village, along with many of its employees, would have been absorbed by the town. A reported concluded that village taxpayers could have saved about $200 a year.

Voters in Naples rejected dissolving that village in 1994, 2001 and 2005, albeit by slimmer margins each time.

About a decade ago, a proposed merger between Richmond and Canadice failed, but unlike Macedon’s dissolution campaign, the Richmond-Canadice merger never came to a vote.

The towns in 1996 requested that the State Comptroller’s Municipal Advisory Review Teams — known as SMART — study whether budgets and taxes could be trimmed if the towns indeed merged. When the SMART report indicated that a merger would make economic sense, an eight-member joint committee was formed with representatives from both towns to further explore the issue. The committee found that merging the towns would save $500,000 ($275,000 for Richmond and $300,830 for Canadice) that year by fusing similar services. Those savings represented about 36 percent of Canadice’s and 23 percent of Richmond’s total spending. Tax rates in both towns would have dropped from $2.12 per $1,000 of assessed value to 57 cents in Canadice and from 89 cents to 57 cents in Richmond.

A referendum would have been needed in both towns in order for a merge to go forward. But while Richmond’s Town Board voted for a referendum, Canadice’s board voted against it. Citizens drafted a petition to try and force a referendum, but the town attorney determined that town law wouldn’t permit a citizen-forced referendum in a consolidation case.

The campaign to merge Richmond and Canadice into a single town — to be called Honeoye — had reached its end, and the issue hasn’t been raised again since.

But that doesn’t mean the towns don’t share services. Both stewards of Honeoye Lake, Canadice and Richmond each pay shares toward the maintenance of a weed-busting machine that keeps the water swimmable. Years ago, the towns shared an official recreation program. And they occasionally share trucks and crews from each other’s highway departments.

Some municipalities have indeed surmounted their fears of identity loss, bitten the bullet and voted for merges — sometimes by slim margins, as in the villages of East Bloomfield and Holcomb in 1990.

Bill Murphy, then the mayor of Holcomb, remembers the merge as a natural evolution of joint meetings the villages had been holding for a number of years.

“We had already consolidated the big items, and we had always shared a lot of things,” he recalls. Holcomb isn’t gone from memory, either — there are still plenty of residents who call it by that name, he says.

Includes reporting by Allison Cooper. Contact Hilary Smith at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 343 or at hsmith@mpnewspapers.com.

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